11 November 2011

'In this major new history of English food, Clarissa Dickson Wright takes the reader on a journey from the time of the Second Crusade and the feasts of medieval kings to the cuisine--both good and bad--of the present day. She looks at the shifting influences on the national diet as new ideas and ingredients have arrived, and as immigrant communities have made their contribution to the life of the country. She evokes lost worlds of open fires and ice houses, of constant pickling and preserving, and of manchet loaves and curly-coated pigs. And she tells the stories of the chefs, cookery book writers, gourmets and gluttons who have shaped public taste, from the salad-loving Catherine of Aragon to the foodies of today. Above all, she gives a vivid sense of what it was like to sit down to the meals of previous ages, whether an eighteenth-century labourer's breakfast or a twelve-course Victorian banquet or a lunch out during the Second World War. Insightful and entertaining by turns, this is a magnificent tour of nearly a thousand years of English cuisine, peppered with surprises and seasoned with Clarissa Dickson Wright's characteristic wit.'

5 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Clarissa is a babe....and so was her late partner Jennifer Paterson. You can have your hot bodies.....give me a Clarrissa or a Jennifer or a Julia Child any day. Oh for the love of those women who know how to fill a man's belly!!!

I, for one, would much rather forgo all of the positive influences of the immigrant community on our national cuisine (however dismal it may be), in lieu of maintaining our essential British character and identity in the face of these relentless, detrimental and most odious incursions and assaults by wogs, kaffirs and muslims on our nation, and western civilization, in general.

Should anyone find my remarks offensive or in any way not PC, you may well imagine my response, so bugger off.